EP4 The Weight of What I've Become
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Welcome back everyone. I'm Aon, and this is Jack the Space Dog. Thanks for coming back — we're just going to pick up right where we left off.
I've come out of the transformation. I now understand the gravity of what I agreed to, even though it wasn't made entirely clear to me going in. I needed something, they needed something — everybody needed something. So I've realized the weight of it. How big of a problem we're really facing.
This original civilization has been around for millions of years. Think about it — in less than 100 years, in just 65 years, we went from discovering flight to landing on the moon. So think about a civilization that stays around for 10,000 years. 100,000 years. A million years. You're talking about science so far outside of our conceivability that we couldn't even begin to guess at what that might look like. We can estimate the amount of energy they might use or how they might go about things, but we have no idea what's actually possible. We're only just unlocking the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and how that even works in the world we can touch.
With a civilization that's been around that long — and has been around since the very beginning of this struggle with the Sect — the issue is perspective. The world I come from can only see what we can see in the sky, and can only travel to what we've built gate-to-gate trans-dimensional travel to reach. If we haven't actually gotten somewhere to build a gate and then colonize it, we haven't seen it.
So what we see as an infection in one quadrant of the galaxy — which is still hundreds of thousands of suns and therefore millions of worlds — that seems enormous. But what we don't see is this: we're just the most recent galaxy to have this infestation. As many worlds in our galaxy that are taken over and consumed by them — multiply that into that many entire galaxies that are already gone. Galaxies we can't even see. Because the Sect warps, they move. And because they go from point to point, these other galaxies are so far away that the time it takes for light to reach us — for us to even realize those galaxies no longer emit light — hasn't caught up yet. We don't even know those galaxies are gone. We think it's a localized problem. It is not. It's an existential problem for existence itself.
They are perpetuating the entropy of existence at an accelerated and inconceivable rate. They're eating. What they leave behind are black holes. If you think of the universe eventually dying a heat death, the very last things that will remain are black holes slowly spinning off excess radiation. The Sect is doing that — but at an incredible rate. They're taking entire galaxies and reducing them down to single supermassive black holes, for the purposes of energy. That's what powers their technology.
On the other side of that, there's the other huge part of the problem — this program that I've now gone through, and that has permanently changed me.
The idea was that two souls would go through the transformation together, as a unit. In my case, it's me and Jack. The reason it had to be me and Jack — and not some other bigger, more intimidating animal — is that it has to be someone you're already deeply bonded with.
The Atlians' candidates were supposed to be specially chosen individuals who had spent years, even decades, out on other planets bonding with other creatures before coming back to go through the trial. Remember, this is a very long-lived race — so what feels like a long time to us is a different scale for them entirely. These candidates were supposed to be the equivalent of highly trained, almost devout monks or scouts — the single-minded special forces of an incredibly advanced civilization.
I'm not that. I'm not that at all. I'm just Aon.
I'm something like the staples-and-duct-tape equivalent of what this program was supposed to be. I'm all there is. So I'm what they got, and I'm what they used. I'm what they talked into it. And they're what I've got.
I would rather have just gone home. Just gone back to my life. But it's what I had.
At the same time, I know I'll never be the same. It's not even clear whether I'll age the same way. Will I have to watch everyone I know die, while I can't — or at least not of age or sickness? Can I still be biologically similar to who I was? Can I still have something resembling a normal life, alongside whatever these responsibilities are going to be? There are no answers to those questions, because I wasn't the intended candidate for this in the first place.
Most of the people who were supposed to go through this would have grown up surrounded by this technology their entire lives. Getting it into their minds and bodies — how to use it — wouldn't really be an issue. It would just be a matter of training and practice. For me, we can get to the training and practice eventually, but first I have to even understand what any of this means.
Here is the simple version of what has been done to me.
A third strand of DNA has been bonded alongside my own. It works as both a reinforcing interface and a control modification interface. Think of DNA splitting apart as RNA — you split it to recode and produce more DNA. This interrupts that process and becomes the control sequence for my DNA. What my body does. What it can do. And it creates a link, on the smallest biological level, between me and this technology. Think of it as somewhere between computing and sensor strips, running at the DNA level through my entire body. It's made out of foreign material that also makes me durable.
The basics of what I can do come down to a few simple principles. I can manifest and destroy matter. This is done through my own captive sun, held in a pocket space — and since suns are where all molecules in this world originate, it functions like a super-advanced forge. I can pull matter out of it in any shape, density, and weight I choose. I can turn energy into matter and matter back into energy. And I can influence and manipulate gravity — which means I can apply all of those things to myself as well. More gravity toward me, away from me, gravity inverted.
I can also split a space from here to another space almost anywhere. I have to be able to think about and visualize the space I want to reach — but in theory, you can go anywhere. It's like having your own dimensional gate as a zipper you can open and walk through to another spot. That's how the Atlas city is actually much more massive on the inside than the outside suggests — it's folded space. The outside is mostly aesthetic.
When you think about those fundamental abilities — manifesting matter, converting energy, manipulating gravity — those are the fundamental forces of the universe. These are powers on the scale of what it might take to create a universe. I'm working with the energy of a single sun, but that is quite a lot.
So I now have the keys. I can access their technology. But I still have to understand how to use it.
I still have months ahead of me on this planet before I can leave — which, by the way, is something they neglected to mention clearly upfront. In the painting The Ship We Call Bedouin, that's actually the end of this period — that's the moment I'm trying to access the ship, starting it up, initiating the drive for the first time. But even that is light years of progress ahead of where I am when I first step out of the Fulcrum.
In the days and weeks after the transformation, it's a mix of a lot of emotions.
I was already someone who'd been held and imprisoned for smuggling artifacts off of planets — from civilizations that hadn't even developed enough to know other civilizations existed. Something that would be genuinely damaging to a culture. I told myself it was a gray area. Everybody else in the galaxy takes it very seriously. I'd already spent years in a detention facility for it.
So I've already done longer stretches than this training period will take, in circumstances I had no choice about. But still — I move back and forth during my training as I explore the city and the planet. I oscillate between teary-eyed wonder at the fact that I can look at a mountain ridge on the other side of the planet and simply step through to it, and then laugh with joy — and then cry, because for all that power, I still just want to go home. I'm still stuck here, and I don't want to have to save everybody. I just want to go home.
You might ask: if I can open a door from one mountain ridge to another, why can't I just go home?
It's complicated. The short answer is because I can see that mountain ridge. I can see it. When I open the door, I know exactly where I am. It's like throwing a ball at a bookshelf across the room — it's right there, you can see it, hand-eye coordination handles the rest. But if I told you that you can throw hard enough to hit Chicago — now throw the ball and hit Chicago. Even if you can throw it that far, what are the chances you're actually going to hit Chicago? Pretty slim.
It's a skill of scale and perspective that I have nowhere to put in my head yet. The Atlians were able to travel dimensionally across galaxies partly because they had a pseudo-map of how things move in the universe. At hundreds of thousands of light years of distance, the movement of one galaxy relative to yours is actually a very large distance — even though it doesn't look like much through a telescope. You have to keep all of that constantly mapped. And the fine-tuning of place-to-place navigation was an intuitive neural adaptation developed by the Atlians over millions of years of technological advancement and deep integration with their own technology. By the end, it would have been hard to tell where the person stopped and the technology began. Their technology is part organic, part inorganic — they needed a seamless meshing.
For me, there is a very clear separation. Nobody has ever had to explain this to someone who didn't already have a deep intuitive grasp of the scale and the nature of their technology. That's why I can't just zip home. And even by the time I can start the ship, I still won't be able to do that. This was supposed to take half a lifetime of training — and they had very long lives.
My training right now is really just about making sure I don't destroy myself or anyone around me. Manipulating the energy of a sun is great in the right circumstances. It vaporizes everything in range. That's fine in battle. It is not fine if you're fighting on a planet you actually want to save.
The three rings you see featured throughout my work — that's representational of a lot of the fundamental workings of their technology. Whenever I shift into what you might call battle mode, I look more like the material they build everything out of. The three rings rotate around me, and they serve as both an access point and an interface for me to control the technology.
But the commands are too complex for language alone. Too complex for thought alone. Too complex for intention alone. It's a combining of all three — along with movement. It looks something like zero-gravity martial arts: me suspended amongst the rings, with my staff as a focal point, using precise movement, precise thought, and focused intention. When those three things line up correctly, they give very specific instructions to the interface, and it does what I want. Something as simple as manifesting a solid object and hurling it is just the beginning. It can do far more — including forming complex geometric structures that neutralize specific targets on a battlefield while leaving others untouched, or precisely extracting the power core from one of these giant insects while holding the resulting singularity in stasis and obliterating the rest.
The limit of the power is the limit of your imagination.
Which is, honestly, probably why I'm something of a good fit for it. That's one respect in which I might actually be ahead of the curve: I can conceive of and imagine pretty dynamic things, because I think in pictures anyway. Their most talented candidates would have been their most creative musicians, artists, martial artists — that sort of person. That's their perfect fit. Strength comes from the protocol and the technology. Ability comes from creativity. Lateral thinking. Non-linear thinking.
In that respect, I'm a good fit. And it's probably the only reason I have any real hope of being able to use this safely in any reasonable amount of time.